Polycom Announces Video Content Management Enhancements, Including New Cloud-Delivered Service for M

Polycom Announces Video Content Management Enhancements, Including New Cloud-Delivered Service for Managing Video Content, Making it Easier and More Cost-Effective for Businesses to Distribute Videos to Employees and External Audiences

Polycom® RealPresence® Media Manager, now available through a cloud-delivered monthly subscription service, helps organizations manage and view live and on-demand video content with no up-front investment required in hardware, configuration or in-house IT services

Polycom® RSS™ 4000 v. 8.5 provides more ease-of-use through enhanced support for Microsoft® Lync™ users, new visual navigation, and an improved user interface

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Polycom, Inc. (NAS: PLCM) , the global leader in open standards-based unified communications and collaboration (UC&C), today unveiled enhancements to the Company's video content management solutions, including a new cloud-delivered version of the Polycom® RealPresence® Media Manager and Polycom® RSS™ 4000 v8.5, which help organizations record, stream, manage and view live and on-demand video content quickly, easily and cost-effectively.

Manage Video Libraries through a Secure Cloud

A new cloud-delivered service option for Polycom® RealPresence® Media Manager is available through a monthly subscription with no up-front investment required in hardware, configuration or in-house IT services. The service can support a range of levels of usage from 1,000 to 12,000 users.

"We are delivering a cloud service that gives our customers flexible op-ex models, an alternative option to a traditional cap-ex model, for the Polycom RealPresence Media Manager. This service gets our customers up and running fast and with a nominal initial investment," said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, President of Products and Services, Polycom. "Whether a customer is implementing a continuing education program for doctors or a knowledge-transfer program for factory workers, or streaming live events to various stakeholders, Polycom's video content management solutions help organizations across industries distribute media more efficiently, making the entire organization smarter, more responsive, and more agile, all while keeping costs down."

"Webcasting is one of the ways Lexus communicates to our dealers and to the public, and Polycom helps us do that," said Sandy Blanchard, Relationship Marketing Manager at Lexus. "Tens of thousands of viewers watch our product launch events via live stream and thousands more access the file for replay. Polycom's cloud-delivered video content management services, in particular, help us with cost savings since we don't need to burden our in-house IT with supporting the high volume of video streams."

"Cloud-delivered subscription models for video content management are making enterprise streaming platforms accessible to a broader range of corporate users," said Steve Vonder Haar, senior analyst at Wainhouse Research. "These cloud-based offerings help reduce the up-front cost, complexity, and time to benefit for rich media content creation, management, and delivery. In addition, the use of a hosted service enables the delivery of content to both employees behind the corporate firewall and partners, customers and prospects on the public Internet. Thanks, in part, to the flexible delivery models available from vendors like Polycom, we expect the enterprise streaming market to enjoy double-digit growth for the next few years."

Record, Stream, and Playback Videos with Ease

The Polycom® RSS™ 4000 records and streams video meetings for internal and external communications, such as employee trainings or customer presentations, which can be viewed in real-time or archived for playback later. The updates to the Polycom RSS 4000 v.8.5 include:

Support for Microsoft IIS Media Services, which dynamically optimizes the video quality in real-time to enable viewers to experience the highest quality stream for their viewing capabilities. RSS 4000 also supports native Windows Media multicast streaming and external Windows Media Servers for live and on-demand streaming.

More power and ease-of-use for Microsoft® Lync™ users -the new Polycom RSS 4000 v. 8.5 is a network-based recording solution that directly connects with Microsoft Lync. Now, Lync users can capture, record and stream video at up to 720p HD quality from the Lync desktop client.

Enhanced, intuitive user interface - still images allow a user to visually navigate the video, making it easier and faster to search, advance or rewind to specific events in a recorded video. For a more customized interface, organizations can add their logo to the portal user interface.

In May 2012, Polycom announced other updates to Polycom® RealPresence® Video Content Management solutions that deliver anytime, anywhere secure access to view live-streaming webcasts and video recordings on-demand through a browser portal from any device, extending users' access to video content from traditional computer systems to Android and iOS-based mobile devices (see the related press release).

These new and enhanced video content management solutions are components of the Polycom® RealPresence® Platform, the most interoperable and comprehensive software infrastructure for universal video collaboration.

Availability

The enhanced RealPresence Media Manager and RSS 4000 solutions are available today. The Media Manager solution is initially available in North America through reseller partners with monthly subscriptions starting at US $5,000 per month for 1,000 concurrent users; the service requires a one-time set-up fee. Polycom RSS 4000 is available in select countries worldwide starting at US$22,500. Initially, the still-image navigation will be available on the desktop portal; the feature will also be available on mobile devices in the future. For more information, visit www.polycom.com or call 1-800-POLYCOM.

About Polycom

Polycom is the global leader in open standards-based unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) solutions for voice and video collaboration, trusted by more than 415,000 customers around the world. Polycom solutions are powered by the Polycom® RealPresence® Platform, comprehensive software infrastructure and rich APIs that interoperate with the broadest set of communication, business, mobile and cloud applications and devices to deliver secure face-to-face video collaboration in any environment. Polycom and its ecosystem of over 7,000 partners provide truly unified communications solutions that deliver the best user experience, highest multi-vendor interoperability, and lowest TCO. Visit www.polycom.com or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to learn how we're pushing the greatness of human collaboration forward.

NOTE: The product plans, specifications, and descriptions herein are provided for information only and subject to change without notice, and are provided without warranty of any kind, express or implied. Polycom reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time. Products and related specifications referenced herein are not guaranteed and will be delivered on a when and if available basis.